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Monday, January 2, 2012

THE TASK IS OURS - Henry Hazlitt

This task has become tremendous, and seems to grow greater every day. . . . The task of the tiny minority that is trying to combat this socialistic drift seems nearly hopeless. The war must be fought on a thousand fronts, and the true libertarians are grossly outnumbered on practically all these fronts.

In a thousand fields the welfarists, statists, socialists, and interventionists are daily driving for more restrictions on individual liberty; and the libertarians must combat them. But few of us individually have the time, energy, and special knowledge in more than a handful of subjects to be able to do this.

One of our gravest problems is that we find ourselves confronting the armies of bureaucrats who already control us, and who have a vested interest in keeping and expanding the controls they were hired to enforce. . . .

We libertarians have our work cut out for us.

In order to indicate further the dimensions of this work, it is not merely the organ- ized bureaucracy that the libertarian has to answer; it is the individual private zealots. A day never passes without some ardent reformer or group of reformers suggesting some new government intervention, some new statist scheme to fill some alleged “need” or relieve some alleged distress. They accompany their scheme by elaborate statistics that supposedly prove the need or the distress that they want the taxpayers to relieve. So it comes about that the reputed “experts” on relief, unemployment insurance, Social Security, Medicare, subsidized housing, foreign aid, and the like are precisely the people who are advocating more relief, unemployment insurance, Social Security, Medicare, subsidized housing, foreign aid, and all the rest.